Advertising  Age  just came out with their annual list of the 10 best ad agencies in America. I must admit that I have a great deal of trouble with the word “best”, even in the rare occasion someone may be applying the word to me or something I’ve done.

While I’m not sure what “best” means, I do know that none of the current 10 shops can say they haven’t put out some lousy stuff. It happens to everyone. But what does best mean? Does that mean they won a bunch of awards? Does it mean that the agency was able to buy up 10 other agencies this past year? Does it mean that they lucked out and didn’t wind up losing too many billings from clients putting them into review? Does it mean their billings for the year went through the roof?

Perhaps because I tend to work too much in a vacuum these days, there were a couple of agency names I had never heard of. And you can’t say it’s because they’re tiny shops, because this year’s winners featured agencies with as many as 10,000 employees. (The article came out a few weeks ago, so it could be up to 11,000) The smallest agency on the list has 120 employees, although I suspect that number will be going up pretty soon too.

Maybe, I’ve been out of the loop and a 120 employee agency is considered small, what about some of the agencies I’ve contracted to do creative with that have 25 people or less. In some case, they have 3 or 4 people. There must be a new category for these agencies. Maybe like in the dog world, where ultra-small dogs are now called “teacup”. Are these agencies with less than 100 people “teacup” agencies or should we have a different term for them, like “muy pequino” or “micro agency” or “mini-me”? Never mind, that last one was taken in Austin Powers.

Hmmm, micro-agency. I thought for the heck, I’d Google “Micro agency” and apparently at least one ad agency called StrawberryFrog is using it. Darn and I thought I made the term up.  But with offices in Mumbai, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo and New York, StrawberryFrog seems far from what I would call micro.

Now Johnny Diaz, who works out of a 12 X 10 office without a parking space, that’s micro.

Oh boy, it seems like I just digressed 2 or 3 good paragraphs worth, which may even be a record for me. Now what was I saying? Oh yeah, what the hell does “best” mean anyway?

Considering that I always like sticking to the brief and looking at things from the client’s viewpoint, I think that best would be the kind of agency that manages to break new ground, come up with the unexpected and help propel their clients agenda and (hopefully, but not always), their bottom line.

Maybe it’s also because the projects I get to deal with often have budgets that are lower than the Mocha Frappuccino bill alone that some of the big boys ring up, I tend not to get too impressed even when something really cool comes along that creative billed out at a couple of million. For criminy sakes, I have some friends who have made incredible feature length films for less dough than that.

As an ADDY Awards coordinator and occasional entrant, I was always amazed at how the judges almost always invariably went for the high priced stuff. The usual suspects tend to win the regional and national gold and silver awards. Quite frankly, I wish the folks who did the spots for “Head On – Apply Directly to the Forehead” had entered a few awards shows. Want to talk about best? They took a crummy “as seen on tv” product and catapulted it to the top of an insipidly crowded and difficult product category. They did it on a relative shoestring too. That to me is “best”

Best, is the agency who figured out how to get a $100,000 budget to play a million bucks. Best is the kid who entered a competition for Chevy and got to have his “Happy Grad “commercial air during this year’s Superbowl game. Although technically, he wouldn’t have gotten to do that if it wasn’t for Goodby, who held the contest that he won. I’m wondering though how they’ll justify doing another commercial for a million dollars after they’ve aired one that cost $15,000. That’s advertising for you.

I like the show “So You Think You Can Dance”. One thing I particularly like about them as opposed to the “American Idol”, is that SYTYCD bills itself not as presenting America’s “BEST” dancer, but uses the word “Favorite”. Although I suppose we could get into a bit of a pissing match regarding favorite, as in “who’s favorite and why”. Since, ultimately the dancer with the most votes wins, and the voters represent America and anybody can vote, then it would seem it is indeed a popular vote. Popular = favorite.

But heck, you can’t even say that about the President of the United States. I saw something recently that showed a person could be elected President with less than 35% of the popular vote.  George W. Bush didn’t have the popular vote. He wasn’t the favorite, but instead some people speaking for us figured he was the “best” choice. There’s that darn “Best” screwing things up again.

In all fairness, Advertising Age did list some smaller shops in a “Standouts to Watch” category, but that seems a lot like going to the prom with your cousin. (I’m not sure what I even mean by that, so you’ll have to come up with your own interpretation.)

And I’m not against the process they used, despite my having no idea what the criteria for “Best” ad agency is or was. Heck, they’re the authority. I’m a nobody.  I just wish they’d call it “Advertising Age’s Favorite 10 Agencies, as opposed to “best”.

My hat’s off to all the hard working advertising agency people who will never make it to the “Best Ten” list, probably won’t make it to the “Standouts to Watch List” and perhaps missed the prom and/ or the Superbowl because they were working on a client presentation. Just keep selling stuff.

And if you need a hand, I’m here and I’d like to be your favorite.

I’m writing this before the Giants and Patriots meet in the 2012 Superbowl championship game. I’ve noticed that while in years past, very few of the scheduled Superbowl ads were leaked prior to the big game, this year, it appears that all, or almost all of them are on YouTube, Hulu or otherwise available for public consumption.

Whether this is an attempt to squeeze every precious drop of promotional blood from them or simply a response to what many people believe will be a record low viewership for the Superbowl is anybody’s guess.

Perhaps not strangely, while in the past I have been invited to numerous lavish Superbowl parties and events, as well as having been featured on a panel here and there to give my critiques of the commercials, this year I have one invite to go to an out of the way sports bar with a friend and watch the game on 1 of 7  – 23 inch t.v.’s strewn around a bar that has been in desperate need of a facelift since 1978. If I accept the invite, I suspect I’ll be spending more time playing Ms. Pac Man and Foosball than actually watching the game.

So, given the fact that I may actually miss the airing of the infamous Superbowl commercials, because I may not actually be watching the Superbowl, it’s nice to be able to see them now.

This morning I got to view one from S.F. agency Venables Bell for their client Audi, which has been dubbed “Twilight”. Clearly this was designed to work on an audience that might view it once or twice. That’s the beauty of a Superbowl ad, you can blow 4 or 5 million on creative and a media buy and not have to design an ad that can be viewed 6,217 times.

I won’t give it away if you haven’t seen it. But I will say that its attention to detail is impeccable and it is extremely well produced. Take a minute out now and watch it.

Now for purposes of full disclosure, I’ve been a big fan of Paul Venables for quite some time and had the pleasure of working on some projects that he was the driving force for when he was at Goodby. I also get to work with some amazing folks at Venables in my current capacity as the spokesperson for Conoco’s Philips 66. Some of the spots are featured here on my voice over page.

http://jsgilbert.com/voiceover/

But getting back to this year’s Audi spot, I think that this has all the freshness, fun and relevance that I felt was missing from a prior Superbowl spot they did for Audi, that was based on the Godfather.  I may be shooting myself in the foot, but I, who was and still am a huge fan of the Godfather, just didn’t  enjoy that spot.

Then again, we can always say that I’m not the right demographic.

Someone asked me earlier today if I thought this new commerical would sell cars and my response was “No, but it’ll get people thinking about AUDI. AUDI will sell the cars, not the commercial ”.

Relationships are complex, interesting things.

Some span considerable distances. Others bridge across different languages and cultures.

Some of my better clients are people I’ve never met in person and probably won’t.

The same may be said of many people I call my friend.

Some are strictly electronic. Some, I couldn’t even tell you if the person I’m communicating with is young or old. And in one notable case, I wasn’t sure if the person was male or female.

Dogs and cats have their own web pages with thousands of followers.

The earth turns very much the same way it always has, it’s just everything else about this big blue ball that has changed, and keeps changing.

And it seems that part of this change is that our communication is really pretty poor. Considering that we have microwaves that cook our dinner in seconds, cars that get us vast distances in no time (not to mention planes) and all the other “time saving” conveniences afforded to modern man, it should seem like we would all have nothing but time on our hands. Time to communicate.

But it seems that we don’t.

So what that often means is…

Things don’t get explained.

Things don’t get double checked.

People don’t exchange pleasantries.

We are now communicating in shorthand.

We look for the easy way out.

We want somebody we can blame.

We don’t have time to look for the truth.

We take the convenient road.

We prefer to believe a good lie.

We’d rather reject somebody on the basis of a few cosmetic differences, than instead look at the things we may have in common.

We’d rather hold other cultures up to the light of scrutiny by comparing their culture to ours, instead of taking the effort to try to see things from their perspective.

We over commit, under execute and make excuses.

We hope our problems will go away if we simply ignore them for long enough.

We turn to others to bail us out of our jams.

We don’t say please or thank you.

We take things for granted.

Back in the dark ages of salesmanship, (perhaps even today) the would be salesperson was told, “On average, it takes 7 no’s to get 1 yes”. I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that the 7 no’s should be from the same person.

So from both the standpoint of being a person who needs to market himself, as well as someone who is marketed to, where is that tipping point between being effective and keeping oneself “top of mind” and the urge to push the “do not call, write, email or even think of me again button”?

Case in point are the fine folks at Omaha Steaks. I buy them once in a while, when they are on super special and there’s somebody very particular I want to send a specific gift of meat to. Truthfully, since one often doesn’t know if someone is a vegan or dyed in the wool carnivore these days, nor whether spouse, child units, etc. may have meat issues, the gift of meat is one I would tend to tread lightly with anyway.

It would be great if the Omaha Steaks people sent me an email once every few months, perhaps a postcard or some other offer 3 or 4 times a year. That seems reasonable and would probably keep them somewhat in my thoughts and be a cost-effective way of keeping a customer, albeit not a huge consuming customer, making the occasional purchase.

This however is not the case. In the past 3 months, I have received over 20 items in my mail box, along with an average of 1.5 emails per day, which was topped off by a phone call to my cell phone the other day. I was actually able to take the call and quite curious to see who it was from, since I had apparently been called by that same number 5 times without being left a message.

But then again, maybe they need all this marketing, because when you come right down to it, they’re really asking you to buy 24 oz of frozen meat for what you could get fresh meat for at generally about the same price as their shipping alone.

Living in a large metropolitan area that is filled to the brim with quality purveyors of almost every type of product one might need or want, and being a bit of the amateur chef myself, it’s highly doubtful I would ever need to purchase Omaha’s highly overpriced, frozen meats over a fresh-cut of Neiman Ranch’s finest at 1/5th the price. And yes, I do understand that for a mere $6 extra per 4 oz steak, Omaha is wrapping a piece of bacon around it.

The interesting thing is that Omaha’s massive campaign to get me to buy more has backfired. I could have been content to be a once or twice a year consumer, becuase it”s kind of different and somewhat cool. But they got me to thinking. And I suspect I’m not the only one who feels this way.

And I’m sorry to be picking on Omaha Steaks, but I guess that’s what top-of-mind can do for you. Realistically, I could have picked any number of places from my local “designer perfume store” to the annoying “overseas musician”, who sends me form emails every two weeks telling me to hire him for all my game composing needs. I’ve actually sent him back several replies to take me off his list and that I don’t hire game music composers, but he persists.

For the average human being who may be interfacing with hundreds of businesses per year, the clutter and annoyance can be immense. In some cases, one can truly opt out; push a button and that’s it. In other cases, the opting out simply triggers new contacts to be made which may go under the heading of “We want you back”, “What do we have to do?” or “Please don’t go!!!”

And of course, in many cases we really don’t want to opt out completely, we just don’t want to be so heavily opted in.

Some of you may think I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, but the facts are that there will be more “information” created in the year 2012 than in all recorded history up until this point.

In my next blog post, I would like to list some of your thoughts and opinions on this subject. I’ll also toss in a few of my  experiences from both the good and the bad pile.

What is the right way to try to stay top of mind?

Do you believe that everyone should be a “brand”?

What works or doesn’t work for you in terms of marketing?

Have you dealt with your own marketing that was “less than effective”?

Anybody out there doing it right? Anybody doing it wrong?

For at least the time being, I’ve decided not to do any writing that is overtly reflective upon the past year. Nor do I want to do any of those predictive pieces either. The truth is that I’ve done several in the past, when I was writing for various magazines and unfortunately quite a bit of my gloom, doom and even nonsense came true. As a goof in “On San Francisco”, a long defunct magazine, I predicted that an odd cult would take up residence at the base of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. This was back in the 80’s and whatayaknow, it came true.

My last prediction was a few years ago when I told everyone to buy gold. I said “I bet that gold will be up over $1,500 in a couple of years” and I made that prediction when gold was around $500 an ounce. Not too many people listened to me. In fact, I didn’t really listen to me.

The problem of course, is that knowledge these days is pretty overrated. College graduates are struggling to find minimum wage employment. The value of being “expert” is completely lost on the “Google Generation”, who finds that any information they need is just a button away.

And when enough people are mediocre at something, we simply lower the bar and make “that” the standard. The “Best Whatever It Is” is simply the one that has figured out how to manipulate social media the best. The 2012 Presidential Election will most certainly be decided by twitter, YouTube, Facebook and perhaps Google+, LinkedIn and several other social media sites. Who cares about policies, platforms and plans?

So, in looking back at the varied things I’ve learned and experienced, I am reminded of one of my particular “stupid moments”.

I was walking down the street one day, doing a bit of window shopping and daydreaming. As I was crossing a fairly wide and highly trafficked San Francisco street, a car came barreling at me, honking his horn furiously. I actually found myself becoming a deer caught in the headlights. I managed to dive a few inches out-of-the-way as he slammed on his brakes and yelled several profanities at me, concluding with “What are you an idiot?”

It all took place in a very short period of time. I gained my composure and half considered calling this ill-mannered twit out, when I had the realization that I was crossing against the light. Big deal maybe, but with morons like him on the road, it was indeed a very stupid thing I had done. So, I simply looked at him, shrugged my shoulders somewhat apologetically and said “Yes, I guess I am an idiot, sorry.”

The next thing to happen was actually one I wish I had on video. The guy behind the wheel looked absolutely upset at the fact that I didn’t start a confrontation. You could see the smoke coming out of his ears as he tried to figure out what sort of asinine retort might actually work against a true admission of guilt and contrition. He stammered a bit and now, the light which had gone from green to red for him was green once again. I saw his window roll up as the smell of rubber and the screech of a tire had him jamming through the intersection as if he had just finished a pit stop at the Indy 500.

This past year, I’ve found a great deal of comfort and freedom in being able to answer questions with “I don’t know”, sometimes even with “I don’t really care.” And I believe that this year, stupid has set me free. With seemingly much of the world having no issues with being predominantly stupid, yet pretending they’re not, I’ve taken delight in my stupid moments, embracing them and even flaunting them.

The Stock Market is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. You stand on a corner and look left and see a line of people waiting to buy high-end appliances. Look the other way and there’s a line of people waiting to get a free meal. Turn on the tv and you see the glitz and glamour of an award ceremony, the excesses of the Kardashians and the arguments from professional ball players over getting 140 million dollars vs. 150 million dollars. The end result will no doubt mean that stadium hot dogs next year will go up to $12 and a beer will cost $15, which at a Costco could get you a couple of six packs and a half-dozen dogs (not to mention 6 free sodas).

Are things getting better? It seems that somebody wants you to think so. The banks seem content to hold on to sell properties at fire sale prices to the already wealthy because for some reason the money they were given to make loans with isn’t money they want to use to make loans.

Politicians have no interest in treating each other with respect, making compromises or even trying to see things from the perspective of the other guy.   And sorry liberals, you’re as much to blame as the right wingers, and the middle wingers and even the people who claim no political affiliation.

Meaningless statistics are flung around with the purposes of either offering some sort of panacea or better yet allow for some group or groups to take the blame.

The 99% movement seems to represent about 1% of the 99% at best and instead of moving anything forward, has simply managed to piss off and inconvenience the rest of the 99%, while at the same time making almost no dent in the armor of the 1%. Yes, there’s a lot of unrest out there, but putting small shopkeepers out of work, placing additional burdens on the middle class and inconveniencing people who are desperately trying to make it, isn’t going to get anywhere in the long run.

Having the opposition use tear gas as a negotiating chip rarely tends to work.

But even with all of this being tossed in our faces, the spin doctors and media keep posting these idiotic numbers that mean nothing. Unemployment is down!!!!!!!!  Yay!!!!

But the truth is there and seems to be getting ignored for the most part. In articles such as this one from the N.Y. Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/business/for-jobless-little-hope-of-full-recovery-study-says.html?_r=1 The Heldrich Institute for Workforce Development at Rutgers is quoted as saying that less than 7% of the people thrown out of work as a result of the recent recession, indicate they have “made it back”. “Made it Back” meaning that they are at a place where their financial state is ok. 70%, believe their situations are dismal and few hold hopes that they will ever have appropriate financial or other stability, this among those who lost their jobs in 2008 and 2009.

In other reports, we see that among hiring bodies, those people who currently don’t have jobs have a monumental task in finding work as opposed to those who are employed and are simply looking for a new job.

We also see that as one’s age increases, their ability to obtain work exponentially decreases. Expect ageism in this country to become the huge elephant in the room. AARP is hoping to play a much greater role in politics in 2012 than ever before. Of course, skewed statements that would have people believe that senior citizens accumulation of wealth, combined with their working beyond age 65 are responsible for the recession, are already flying in attempts to turn the world against the “Gray Force”. Remember that politicians get huge pensions and don’t need social security. Many would eat their young if it might help them make a few more million, so shutting the door on seniors, who have PAID into a system all their lives isn’t half as bad an option as eating their young.

And lest we point the finger at any individuals, we now see that some giant corporations have been afforded greater rights by the supreme court than many citizens in America seem to have.

Being able to buy a big screen tv for Christmas on your 29.9% interest charging credit card this year is no indicator that things are getting better, but simply indicative of the incredible way that consumerism can manage to cut through even the worst of situations.

Here we see some interesting statistics from the  Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. 40% of college graduates who are able to obtain employment work in positions that clearly do not require a college degree. 1.94 million College graduates are “mal-employed”, meaning working at minimum wage or other low skills type positions.

But with so many college graduates looking for work, even those hiring for menial jobs are tending to be more choosy. Consider the high and rising cost of a college education, and many are beginning to question its value.

We can also look at huge numbers of individuals who are no longer being counted among the unemployed, but who are involved in pursuits that only in the rarest of circumstances will yield sufficient incomes for those people to become self-sufficient. These include many things that have generally been considered hobbyist work, such as beading, acting, writing, painting and many other forms of creative pursuits that are unlikely to yield financial gains.

Despite the great prognosticators  saying that we seem to be in recovery and denying there will be a double dip recession, one merely needs to look closely between the lines to see that we are still in a great deal of trouble. Other economic indicators might show large numbers of adult children requiring consistent payments from aging parents to help cover expenses. Huge declines in
property values, which are often the major components of a retirees portfolio mean many of these individuals may not have sufficient future funds to cover medical expenses or senior care.

But it even goes beyond this. With many companies sensing an almost “penalty” for expanding their workforce in the United States, the temptations of going overseas keep getting better and better. For example, the top 5% of students in India who are graduating this year represents a larger number than ALL students enrolled in higher education in the United States. Brazil, Russia, India and
China now seem to represent a much greater chance for wealth, success and opportunity than the U.S. does and business, big and small is aware.

You might want to hold off buying that big screen tv, get chummier with your boss and stash some money in the mattress. Hold on tight because for a lot of us, this already bumpy ride may get a bit bumpier. Also, learning a little Hindi and Mandarin may not hurt.